1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems that support computer-based forms. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates using a rendered form as a search template.
2. Related Art
Over a period of time, end-users of electronic forms typically submit an increasing amount of data that is archived in some type of back-end data store. For example, expense request forms and timesheet forms are often archived in this way. An end-user will periodically have to search for a specific form that they have previously submitted (e.g., to find the expense form for the trip to Norway).
In order to perform this search in an existing system, a system administrator is typically required to: (1) pre-define specific fields on the form as “searchable;” (2) assign a user-friendly name to each searchable field; and to (3) expose the searchable fields to the end-user in a generic search page. The user-friendly name is needed because the internal field names are typically not meaningful to end-users (e.g., “EXP_IT_DESC” might be the internal field name for the Expense form's Item Description field, but this internal field name may not mean anything to the end-user).
Hence, in an existing system, to invoke a search, the end-user: (1) selects the “friendly” field(s) of interest; (2) specifies a comparison type (=, >, starts-with, etc.); and finally (3) specifies a comparison value into an associated text box.
Note that the above-described process requires the system administrator to perform a significant amount of work to allow the end-user to search for a specific form field. Furthermore, this work has to be repeated for every form and every field that the end-user needs to search for. Moreover, during this entire process, there is no intuitive connection between the actual rendered form and the associated search. Consequently, the end-user has to properly associate fields on the generic search page with desired fields in the actual rendered form.
Hence, what is needed is a method an apparatus that facilitates searching for a form without the problems described above.